Beijing t-shirts
Many people here wear t-shirts with texts on them. It seems to be a trendy thing to do. These are often in English and may be expressions, or simply words, like love, or brandnames, like Nike. (Catherine Clover, who is also on this blog and in the Red Gate residency, remarked that brands are a common language. If you say to a cab driver, take me to Starbucks, you can be sure there is no confusion.) In thinking about the way corporate space informs who we are and what we do, I’m interested in the way brands are inserted and penetrate our lives. You can see this in previous work I’ve done including 24/7, Testdrive and Totalled (www.cathybusby.ca).
I’m asking myself if wearing such t-shirts is emblematic of an idealized freedom of expression, or do the wearers just like the colours and design? Is it a happy expression of a move away from the uniform and uniformity/conformity?
I started taking pictures of people wearing t-shirts a couple of days ago. I soon realized I should ask their permission to do this. So yesterday I met with Red Gate’s translator, Sol Nan, known in English as Kelly. I explained that I thought I wanted a card, like a business card to give to people whose t-shirts I wanted to snap. I asked her if this would make sense to people, or if it would be too much of an intrusion, or just not make sense culturally. She thought it would work. We went to a printer’s where Kelly and the layout person worked it out. I’ll pick up the cards tomorrow morning.
